Category: Life at Stanfords

Valerie Osment, the artist who created the wonderful ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ BookBench we have in our Long acre store shares her inspiration with us and explains the process involved.

The BookBench’s design pays homage to Jules Verne’s colourful adventure novel of the same name, where Phileas Fogg of London and his French valet Passepatout attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a £20,000 wager. Inspired by a desire to create an eye-catching pictorial realisation true to the classic tale, I wanted to offer a tantalising story synopsis to the viewer whilst enticing those that hadn’t read the novel to do so.

Published in 1873, with Verne setting the story one year earlier, my design purposefully acknowledges the iconic symbol of the hot air balloon. Mention Phileas Fogg and you automatically think ‘hot air balloon’, the association is just so engrained within the character be it on a crisp packet, in a film or a cartoon. But whilst reading the original novel for design idea research, meticulously flipping pages back and forth to pinpoint exact ports of call, arrival/departure times and transport modes utilised, key plotline elements, no balloon was to be found. As I approached the end of the book with confusion and a little worry – I had decided early on that the balloon would be my dominant visual lynchpin – I decided to google it. And there appeared my answer. The hot air balloon was never actually used by but introduced by the popular 1956 film adaption and  has been repeatedly used by subsequent others ever since, hence becoming part of the mythology of the story. Finding this fact quite fascinating, I felt that this was in itself a significant enough reason for it still to be a central feature of my design. Continue reading ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ BookBench